Bad girls do the best sheets

April 24, 2003 — 10.00am

They were called "laundry slaves" - women and teenage girls employed in commercial laundries run by Catholic religious orders, the idea being to combine rehabilitation of supposed delinquents with the chance to earn a modest profit.

In Ireland, where welfare of juveniles was generally in church hands, such laundries were commonplace, the girls often housed in so-called "magdalenes". In these large, often forbidding edifices they lived with prostitutes, unmarried mothers and others who were promiscuous, plain (ie, unmarriageable) or simple-minded. Some of them, incredibly, had been placed there by their own parents. Once incarcerated, their sentence could be long-term.

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The fact that girls were "hidden away" created an air of mystery, adding fuel to the prurient interest often shown in the redemption of "fallen women". An Anglo-Irish-Scottish feature film, The Magdalene Sisters, screening in Australia, purports to tell their story.

Though they do not feature in the film, Australia, too, had its "laundry slaves", albeit a milder version of their Irish counterparts. They were teenagers considered not quite "fallen", but in moral danger, nevertheless, and whose lives and working conditions aroused interest and sectarian passions in the postwar years.

In Australia in the 1950s there was a saying, "Bad girls do the best sheets." It referred to convent laundries established in Brisbane (Mitchelton), Sydney (Ashfield), Melbourne (Abbotsford), Adelaide (Plympton) and Perth (Leederville). The laundries were large, each employing about 50 people in washing, ironing and packing.

Ann Patterson, who worked in two of them, says the phrase about best sheets rings true: "We did all the good hotels; all their beautiful white, starched linen. It was damned hard work."

There was an element of symbolic cleansing in such employment, the washing of sheets suggesting a search for purity.

The Australian laundries were run by the Good Shepherd Sisters, an order of nuns. Many of the girls had been in children's homes run by the Sisters of Mercy, a parallel order. Patterson, for instance, was raised in the Mercy Sisters' orphanage (now the subject of considerable notoriety) at Neerkol, Rockhampton.

Controversy over the laundries was fanned by articles in a Sydney-based publication, The Rock, whose editor, Wal Campbell, carried out a one-man crusade against Romanism, as he called the Roman Catholic Church, and its perceived evils.

Campbell claimed the Good Shepherd Sisters (and by implication the entire Australian Catholic hierarchy) were involved in a major racket. His paper hinted at babies born in convents and girls in the laundries being killed off or dying from exhaustion and being buried in "strange places".

Patterson said: "People joke about it being slave labour, but that's what it was. Staff from the hotels would occasionally forget to fold the tablecloths and shove them in the laundry baskets without checking. When we shook them a 10-shilling note might fall out. We used to keep that in case we ran away."

Patterson says that leaving the orphanage was conditional upon going to work in the Good Shepherd laundry which served Brisbane.

It was hard, unpaid work in hot, steamy conditions. There were several attempted escapes. Two girls allegedly got away by granting sexual favours to the men who delivered and collected the sheets in their trucks.

Patterson, on behalf of the "workers" in Mitchelton, took a radical step. "I got the girls organised and we said, 'We're going to strike because this is dreadful. We should get paid something for this."'

The strike lasted three days and the girls lost. "We had no choice but to go back to work because the nuns refused to feed us." Patterson was ultimately expelled, her desired outcome.

The Good Shepherd laundry which served Sydney was housed in a complex of buildings in Victoria Street, Ashfield. In 1993 the Planning Department listed the complex as having heritage value.

Girls came from a variety of sources, including the Hopewood House children's home at Bowral. The home was run by a Sydney businessman, and accused pedophile, L.O. "Daddy" Bailey. Though claiming friendship with prime ministers, his modus operandi was decidedly odd. He had a Nazi-style interest in eugenics. And he openly spoke of his goal - which he mercifully failed to achieve - to raise and ultimately mate 40 perfect males with 40 perfect females.

Girls who did not make the grade were among those transferred into the care of the Good Shepherd nuns, where they stayed until 18. Some considered this a worse sentence than Hopewood.

The laundry which served Adelaide, probably the most controversial, was staffed mainly by girls housed in a female borstal known as The Pines. This, like the laundry itself, was run by the Good Shepherd Sisters. Some were sent there by the courts, others transferred from the Goodwood children's home run by the Sisters of Mercy.

The Pines was the Colditz of church-run institutions, whose inmates were the runaways and incorrigibles from other children's homes and institutions. A Goodwood girl who narrowly avoided this punishment said: "The Pines was for bad girls. That was the way they said it, bad girls. It put the fear of hell into us."

Goodwood and other orphanages were bad enough, but The Pines was supposedly worse. Girls were asked to adopt saints' names on arrival. This was to avoid a situation where "if someone got hold of a newspaper they would know what you were in there for".

Raelene Houlihan (then Heather Mullen), who was there in the 1960s, said inmates did the usual household duties: rising at dawn, scrubbing and polishing floors "until they shone". This was in addition to the laundry work which filled most of their day. "You really were nothing but a slave. You'd go to Mass, have breakfast, then straight into that laundry, where you'd work until about five o'clock."

Discipline at The Pines was largely in the hands of older girls, regarded as trustees. Glenis Kenward said: "If the nuns said 'Jump', they'd say, 'How high?' They more or less helped the nuns run the place."

Though sent to The Pines as "uncontrollable", the young offenders had committed crimes which were hardly serious. Houlihan was admitted to Goodwood aged five and was released at 14 to return to her mother. She describes what happened next.

"I'd had this strict upbringing [at Goodwood]. You didn't talk about sex. You only had sex with the person you married. I found out my mum wasn't married to this man. There was nothing wrong with him - he was wonderful, and he later became my stepdad. But I said, 'I'm not living with you. You're living in sin. I could go to hell for this.' So I ran away. The nuns had told me to run from sin, and that's what I did. Of course, the police found me and asked why I had fled. So I told them. I can still remember the looks on their faces. They must have busted themselves trying to stop laughing."

The institution had a five-metre fence around it, so escape was difficult. Two girls, now middle-aged, said: "We hid until the nuns were out of the way, picked up a Bible, of all things, smashed a window with it, and up over the fence."

In the Adelaide laundry, unlike most of the others, girls were paid. Kenward says she received the equivalent of 30 cents a fortnight, "but if you did something wrong you got docked. Most of the time I had none, because I was caught talking in the dormitory or something." (Lights out was at 8pm.)

Despite this, she is uncomplaining about the laundry work. "It was pretty hard really, but I suppose not too bad. I was put onto a press, and we had to starch hospital doctors' white coats and stuff like that. When I left I was able to get a job in a laundry doing the same thing. I was quite experienced by then."

Nor is she unduly critical of The Pines. "At Goodwood you were belted every night, but at The Pines if you toed the line you were all right. I suppose I was institutionalised and it was part of my make-up."

The Ashfield laundry took girls from various sources. In August, 1954, two young women quit the laundry in dramatic fashion by climbing down a ladder of knotted sheets from an upper window. Unfortunately, it was too short and they fell the last six metres, sustaining injuries requiring hospitalisation.

They were older than the norm, 25 and 29. Both had spent their childhood in orphanages and even as adults knew only institutional life. They were found at midnight near Central Police Station, one trying to help her (more injured) partner. An ambulance driver took them to St Vincent's Hospital. This angered The Rock, which feared a papist hospital would simply spirit the unhappy pair back into the nuns.

The Rock had a field day, as did several other newspapers. A Catholic Church spokesman, Monsignor Tom Wallace, said it was an "escapade" rather than an escape and the women were "free to come and go as they wished".

Critics were unconvinced, referring to the women's callused hands and the fact that each had worked in the laundry for about 12 years. The two women told a welfare officer that neither had received any payment, or indeed handled money of any kind.

This prompted Campbell to accuse the child welfare department of complicity in their neglect. He also claimed the girls were owed a minimum of £4000 each - then a sizeable sum - in back pay. When the fuss died, the Herald sent a staff reporter to visit the Ashfield laundry. He reported that conditions were, in fact, excellent and that when the girls left to take up other employment, the nuns gave them a trousseau, a sum of money and references.

The last of the convent laundries closed in the 1970s. The former "laundry slaves" have met with mixed fortunes. Many have been in jail, a few have committed suicide, others have prospered. Patterson, for instance, has overcome severe personal trauma to become a talented pianist. She recently gained a Forde Foundation grant (named after the inquiry into child abuse in Queensland) and hopes to stage a musical recital on the theme "Towards Healing".

Dirty laundry was not aired

Only one investigation of the convent laundries was ever undertaken - in 1953, in Western Australia. The then premier, Bert Hawke, responded to concerns of parliamentarians about the orphanages and children's homes by inviting Richard Henry Hicks, head of the NSW Department of Child Welfare, to carry out an independent investigation.

His report laid most of the blame on government financial niggardliness, but criticised some odd targets, all of which persuaded Mr Hawke to remove all three copies before anyone other than himself, a handful of colleagues and a favoured journalist had seen it.

According to the journalist, Mr Hicks gave a clean bill of health to most Catholic institutions - including the Good Shepherd children's home and laundry at Leederville - while strongly criticising a Salvation Army home, whose children wore "second-hand, patched and torn" clothing.

That such "minor" matters should arouse condemnation outraged the Salvos' many admirers, who suspected - in the light of history, correctly - that far worse was happening elsewhere.

It later transpired Hicks had not even visited the Christian Brothers' Bindoon orphanage, later revealed to be possibly the most appalling children's home ever to exist in Australia.

I met a former Salvos staff member who said the Salvos could not afford new brushes or combs, and that her duties had included begging for not-quite-fresh vegetables and door knocking for discarded combs and toothbrushes.